Australian Response

First, you ought to open your browser and you ought to write the information science address, 192.168.1.254.

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typing: http://192.168.1.254.

If you've got this kind of router, we tend to advocate that you simply talk over with the user manual for

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I don't think this is casedemics at work. Australia has a much higher hospitalisation rate because it has a much lower (full or partial) vaccination rate. There's evidence that, as well as reducing your chances of becoming infected, vaccination also means that if you do become infected your chances of becoming seriously ill are reduced.

Vaccination rates

Shouldn't come as a surprise. A few of us on here have been saying for ages that australia just kicked the can down the road a bit but can't avoid covid forever. Even if they had higher vaccination rates it would still be spreading like wildfire with little natural immunity.

Are people serious about Australia ???

The delta variant is more transmissable, but doesn't seem as serious.

I would be more worried about the govt. tyrannical approach to the situation in Australia than the danger of the virus.

It goes even further than that. I live in North Sydney. There has been two or three cases this side of the city in the latest outbreak. If I call the dr about something, they'll say get a test. Anyone can stroll up and get one.

I can't remember a stage where tests were restricted.

When we didn’t have vaccines we were dealing with a variant that was much easier to control. Sydney is in lockdown for 3 weeks now and cases are still going up. I hope they can find a solution.

I'm comparing to other countries though. Even with the earlier variants, Europe and the US were smashed. NSW might be looking at the same situation Europe was in last Spring, but the vaccines are here now. Even though the rollout hasn't been great.

I feel terrible for Australia, I'm not sure whether this is controllable. With their low vaccination rates & a very fast-spreading variant they are in an incredibly difficult place. The only perhaps "good" thing is Europe & the US are coming to the end of their vaccination programs, so hopefully there will be good vaccine supply available - but they'll need to deploy this extremely quickly to their population.

It kindof puts a lie to the whole "zero covid"/quarantine thing too. All it takes is one mistake or missed case, and suddenly you go from normality to lockdown almost overnight. It must be exhausting.

Honestly? No, it's not exhausting. We've spent the last 15 months looking at Ireland, the UK and Europe and thinking that must be exhausting. For us, normality has been, well, normal. We go to work, we go to pubs, we go to theatres and shops and sporting events and restaurants. This normality has been occasionally punctured by sudden lockdowns, but they are very brief; I've had two this year — one of 3 days, and one of 4 days. Last year, after a four-week lockdown in March/April, I had no lockdowns at all. Not everywhere in Australia has been quite as fortunate as that, but nowhere has suffered anything like the degree of restrictions that characterised most European countries for much of last year. And we've had fewer Covid infections, fewer Covid deaths, and a much smaller hit to the economy. You can debate whether Australia's relatively happy experience is due to good luck or good judgment, and you can point to things that weren't done well and could have been done better, vaccination being the obvious case. But if the question is, who has been subjected to more exhaustion, well, it's not us. Not by a mile. Not even now.

The number and length of lockdowns may now increase, in response to the higher infectivity of the delta variant, and that may persist until whenever Australia reaches US/European levels of vaccination (which may be many months). But, honestly, at this stage I don't see restrictions in Australia getting anything like as severe as they were in Europe last year, and into this year.

Yes, that's true. That's largely down to poor performance on vaccination by the Australians. I'd argue, though, that - given that poor performance - the Australian model of moving quickly to hard but short lockdowns is still the optimal strategy. It's certainly less "exhausting" than any of the alternatives, and it will minimise the "havoc with health systems and economies" that you mention. Most of the commentary here on why Sydney seems set to face a rather longer lockdown attributes this to the failure to lock down early enough and comprehensively enough.

I'd also suggest that the UK/US feeling that they are "getting to the point where they will return to normal life, without the permanent spectre of COVID cases playing havoc with health systems and economies" may be a bit premature. The UK experiment with substantially abandoning restrictions while the disease is still widespread and nearly half the population is not yet fully vaccinated may yet turn out to be a poor decision; a lot of the medics seem to think that it's pretty much the experiment you would run if you wanted to create a large-scale laboratory for the cultivation of vaccine-resistant variants. And if that's true, of course, it will impact not just the UK but the whole world.

Sure. But the dominant opinion in Australia isn't "we shouldn't be locking down". People are upset about lockdown but it doesn't follow that they want the lockdowns to end. The need for lockdown is widely recognised and, if anything, public opinion leans towards the view that governments are too slow to lockdown. Anger is focussed not on the decision to lock down but on the fact that a lockdown is necessary, and this is blamed on (a) the slow pace of lockdown; and (b) deficencies in the hotel quarantine system.

Most people reckon that, when all's been said and done, Australia will have experienced (a) much less lockdown, and (b) much more restriction of travel, than other countries. And most people also reckon that that's a good tradeoff.

Long way? not really that long. Australia is about 10 weeks behind Ireland in terms of Vaccinations. Where Australia is today Ireland was on 11th May.

Ireland started its vaccinations 29th Dec, Australia started on 21st Feb which is about 7 weeks so the pace if off by about 3 weeks. If you are getting back to normal then great we will probably be the same 10 weeks later.

But you wont be getting the last 10 months back.